Inflammation is part of the body's attempt at self-protection, and functions to remove harmful stimuli and begin the healing process. Inflammatory disorders arise when inflammation becomes uncontrolled and causes destruction of healthy tissue. Inflammation can be acute or chronic. Acute inflammation has a rapid onset, often becomes severe, and usually resolves in days or weeks. Chronic inflammation generally progresses less rapidly, and may last for months or even years.
Although limited, mild to moderate psoriatic skin disease can often be controlled by topical agents; more severe disease usually requires systemic therapy. While psoriasis was once thought to be a local hyper-proliferative disorder of keratinocytes, it is now recognized that psoriasis is a chronic systemic inflammatory disease with a prominent role for the immune system. Psoriasis affects 2-3% of the U.S. population and is a source of substantial morbidity. Psoriasis often has a significant effect on patients' quality of life due both to the physical appearance of the skin lesions and the psychosocial consequence of their appearance.
Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common form of immune-mediated arthritis, affecting more than 1.3 million Americans, and is the most disabling type of arthritis. It most commonly affects the wrist and small joints of the hand. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) involves chronic inflammation of all or part of the lower digestive tract. The two most common types of IBD are ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. In Crohn's disease, inflammation can affect the entire digestive tract, while in ulcerative colitis, only the large intestine is affected by inflammation. Uveitis is a destructive inflammatory disease of the middle layer of the eye, and is the third leading cause of blindness worldwide. Uveitis can occur as an autoimmune disorder or as a result of injury, infection or exposure to toxins.
The recognition of the immune mediation of these disorders has led to a number of new therapeutic targets for these disorders. Among the principal targets are actions of proinflammatory cytokines and their associated transduction pathways, which include tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α), various interleukins (especially IL-6 and IL-12), the Janus kinases (JAKS) and phosodiesterase-4 (PDE4). A number of recent studies suggest that the release of these cytokines and their transduction pathways contribute to the initiation or persistence of the inflammatory process in psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, IBD and uveitis.
The past 20 years have witnessed the development of a succession of biologic therapies for psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and uveitis. Biologic therapies or biologicals are medicinal substances that are extracted from or synthesized from a living organism or its products for prevention or treatment of a disease. They interfere with specific components of the body's immune system and are consequently more targeted than older systemic treatments for many inflammatory disorders. Biologicals have proven to be effective therapies for these complex inflammatory diseases. However, while useful treatment options, biologicals have a number of limitations, including uncommon but extremely serious side effects (such as reduced ability to fight infections and a measurable increase in the incidence of lymphoma), high patient costs, and a lack of or loss of efficacy in a material number of patients.
These issues have prompted a continuing search for additional or alternative therapies which are directed at the inflammatory pathways. To improve patient response rates and reduce the substantial annual cost a patient and the U.S. health system is burdened with, I have investigated the therapeutic use of combinations of natural dietary constituents, a number of which have purported anti-inflammatory properties. I have discovered that a handful of natural dietary constituents combined in natural complexes, in very specific proportions, have clinically useful anti-inflammatory properties. Such complexes can be administered by themselves in pharmaceutical preparations designed for oral administration, e.g. tablets, capsules, oral solutions and suspensions for amelioration of psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, IBD and uveitis; or they can be administered in oral pharmaceutical preparations with other dietary supplement ingredients. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, such complexes can be adjunctively administered with biologicals to improve patient responsiveness as well as potentially dramatically reduce costs of therapy.